Having trouble finding a decent library and/or comic shop?

The last time my Wife and I moved, it was to the other side of our hometown. This wasn’t that big of a change as we were familiar with “that side of town”. We had always lived in areas where things were easy to get to (street lay outs made sense, things were connected by highways, everything was within reasonable walking distance).

Our first order of business after all of the dust settled from relocating was where the library was. We were lucky with our first two apartments. Both libraries were within walking distance. Pretty handy when you have young kids you’re raising.

The 2nd to last time we moved really sucked. On “that side of town”, nothing was connected by any semblance of a highway. It’s all side streets and main drags (none of which seem to go by a traditional grid structure that Civil Engineers use today, everything tends to veer one way or the other…) and roundabouts (of which, people drive like assholes in).

We eventually found the libraries within our area (which weren’t within a reasonable amount of walking distance) but an idea struck me: Is there a search engine for libraries?

Yes there is!

As a litmus test, I entered all of my previous addresses and it correctly brought up all of the libraries within the areas entered.

Link to it, favorite it, bookmark it now. You’ll thank me later.

Through a fluke coincidence, as I was starting the second installment of The Umbrella Academy I discovered something remarkable on the bottom of the masthead page, (Thats the page after the title page inside any given book. I don’t know if that’s the proper term for the page that credits everyone involved with making a graphic novel collection per se, I just know that that is the common term in publishing.) the Comic Shop Locator Service, (888)-266-4226.

I was intrigued, so I dialed the number. Servicing America and Canada, this is an automated service that gives you the address and telephone number of every possible Comic Shop within a given area code. I wish I would have had something like this around when I was a kid.

While this post may seem like a feeble attempt to promote independent ownership in an age when convenience is dominant, consider this: it unfortunately is.

In an age when computers and big box retailers are running the gamut on ALL types of literature, plugging an automated location service seems a little redundant.